Vestal Review. Don't flash without it.

Web Issue 34
July 2008
Missing by Marcia Aldrich    
You find a janitor pushing his mop outside your office.  “You’re late,” he says as you side-step his pail, but slip. And he has to grab you  to  keep you from falling. He holds onto your arm a little longer than necessary, you think. He’s probably your age, though hard to gauge in the twilight. When he looks down at his mop after he’s detached himself from your arm, you detect shyness.    [more]      
                                                                                  		 Contributors' Notes  
What You Tell Your Therapist When He Asks Why You Have Panic Attacks by Tammy Guzman    
There are things you should never have to hear. Like your mother having sex. Loudly.
Editorial
The Homecoming by Kyle Hemmings  
After the car accident, your body turned stiff as stone and I became a cloud gatherer.      
The Homecoming,  The Girl Alone in Her Room and What You Tell Your Therapist When He Asks Why You Have Panic Attacks are available only in the print  issue.
My Pacific by Ladisa Quintanilla
It felt like a fire erupted from above, invisible molten sparks singeing the hairs on my arms, melting my skin into puddles of brown tar.  It was hot.  I came home to bury my uncle.  We weren’t close, but those things are forgotten in death. [more]

Call for submissions:

Short On Sugar
An Ugly Man by Ana Marcela Fuentes
On her lunch break, she dumps Luis for Daniel Towens, the ugliest man in the county [more].
The Girl Alone in Her Room by Alissa Nutting
 The girl alone in her room held a turtle whose skin reminded the girl of burned or dead skin.

                

Vestal Review does not get any funding. We pay our writers. Please subscribe to the print issue.

My Life at First Try, a novel. 

Advance praise.

Katharine Weber, the author of the novels "Triangle," "The Little Women," "The Music Lesson" and "Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear:"

Mark Budman has a pitch perfect ear for the rhythms and sounds of English filtered through the hypervigilant sensibilities of a Russian Jewish immigrant. The narrator's mordantly witty, deadpan account of his life is told in short discrete segments like a string of linked stories, and the cumulative power of this voice drives the novel from first page to last.  Mark Budman is a powerful, exciting, and original writer, and My Life At First Try deserves recognition and success.
Site design copyright © 2008 Vestal Review. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form, including storing it in any medium by electronic means whether or not temporary or incidental to some other use.